Tower of Ring This tower is lucid. The visibility of this tower differs in accordance with the very motion of the atmosphere and every change of sky and light. No doubt this tower forgets that it is a tower. Building such a lucid tower in the middle of a big square, which is covered just by stones, can be referred to building a “void” in an empty space.

This square is the center of downtown Tianjin. Accordingly it is a very important place. We dare to design a void space and emptiness, which has no sense of presence. This way of thinking is based on oriental ideas. This tower is very oriental.

People forget which one they look up to: the tower or the sky. It has an eye-opening shape, its beginning and ending is invisible. It is designed like a flow of stream, yet the form is very simple.

No observatory to climb up.
No space to play.
There is nothing inside.
Only emptiness.

On Design and Structure

All the material used to build this tower is cast-steel. This is the only tower in the world where cast iron is exclusively used for the construction. This is the number one tower in the world.

It was on December 31, 2011 when we started to make first drawings. The completion of the tower was April 23, 2012,. From the start of planning, only four months were given until completion. Cast-steel is used to meet such a limited construction period.

1,136 pieces of wave* shape pattern members are used for this tower. In case 4 pieces of wave* shaped cast-steel members make one member, more than 284 members can be made with only one tooling, so the tooling cost does not affect too much to the total building cost.

Wave* shape iron steel is a piece of a circle, and it has no straight part. It is twisted; this can be realized with cast steel. 71 of wavy levels are piled up to build a big cylinder shaped tower.